At the moment we seem to be getting more and more Olympic related advertisements as the country gears up to the London 2012. With so much money thrown behind sponsorship deals and having athletes as brand spokespeople, you’d think there would be one campaign that would impress. Yet, the campaign that has most impressed me this year has to be the marketing activity being conducted on behalf of Sir Ridley Scott’s forthcoming movie ‘Prometheus’.

Now I’ll be honest with you. I don’t have that much interest in the Olympics, and I am a big movie fan… so my views are probably biased. Yet as an ‘Ad Man’, I am genuinely in awe with what I am seeing created to raise awareness of Prometheus. Now forget about the flashy website and the teaser trailers and international trailers that come attached to any movie release… what I want to highlight are some of the cute and clever things that have been done to raise awareness of what will probably be one of the year’s biggest films.

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The last time a future King got married I was only seven years old, and to be honest I was probably too busy playing with my X-Wing to care about watching some stupid wedding. However, 750 million people apparently didn’t think it was stupid and tuned in on their TV sets to watch Charles and Diana walk down the aisle.

I’ll be honest with you; this whole marriage of William and Kate isn’t something that I’ll be tuning in to watch on the TV. But having discovered how much effort is going into the social media activity for the wedding, I will be taking a look at how things run on the big day… purely out of professional curiosity.

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Technology. It does not like to stand still does it. In fact it makes me smile that if we grabbed someone from ten years ago and dropped him or her in the middle of the Technology for Marketing & Advertising Expo at Earls Court in London… they would probably think they were at least 100 years in the future.

It’s very easy to walk round here and look at some stands and just say ‘Wow, that’s clever’. It’s also very easy to attend some talks that really get your mind racing with the possibilities for your clients… so it’s probably a good job I’m spending today and tomorrow here then!

Thanks to it being painfully slow to get in, I missed the special keynote presentation from Google. From what I could gather, they are saying mobile phones are the future and they were amazed how many people relied on mobile browsing during the ash cloud crisis of 2010.

Anyway, despite missing that talk, here’s what I did manage to listen in on, on day one.

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Facebook, Twitter and YouTube… not what first springs to mind when you think about politics. But over the last few years, more and more politicians have started using the internet as a tool to drum up political support.

When the Presidential elections in the US got under way in 2008, Democratic candidate Barack Obama used the internet to great effect to raise funds and gain supporters in his race to be President. His success has seen UK politicians follow suit and with the current general election, UK political parties have been pushing their online activities more than ever. Below are some examples of what they’ve been up to:

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As fellow marketers it can’t have escaped your attention that the marketing landscape in which we work is changing at an amazing rate.  The way we communicate with our customers isn’t the same as it once was and it is certainly going to continue changing over the forthcoming years.

Traditionally, we have spoken to our customers via direct mail, email, tv, radio and the telephone.  However, due to the boom of social media this one-way communication flow is changing into a more dynamic two-way conversation.

In my view, the major change that has occurred is social media is giving our customers a voice; it’s giving our customer’s power.  So whereas the customer was only able to affect our business through their purchasing behaviour they can now have the power to influence our future by what they say about our brand, product and service offering.  However, although these are undoubtedly exciting times they are times that should be treated with caution as we have very little control as to what our customers say about us and we have even less control over who they speak to.

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Last year, like many brands and organisations, London Fashion Week flirted with Social Media by having event details, links to stories and comments posted on Twitter and Facebook… so far so very 2009!

This year, though, sees London Fashion Week take a great leap forward by embracing even more Social Media technologies and making London Fashion Week open to the masses rather than the privileged few… and they’ve done it in some predictable and also some surprising ways.

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We’re extremely proud of our work on the Swinton Mystery Tipper, especially as it has garnered the agency an armful of awards from two DMA Awards to two ISP Awards and two IPA Effectiveness Awards. We’ve had quite a few people ask to see our winning entry form… so here it is!

CONTEXT AND MARKET BACKGROUND

The insurance sector is a complex and increasingly challenging marketplace. For most of us, insurance has always been a distress purchase – something we grudgingly concede we need to have, and resent the increasing premiums. Three key innovations in the last decade have had a significant impact on the broader market. The launch of Direct Line’s online insurance offer, in 1999, following the formula of its breakthrough approach to offering insurance by telephone a decade earlier, forced every insurer and broker to reassess their approach – here was a company that made buying insurance simple and fuss-free, cutting out the middle man and talking everyday language. This sparked an extended period of discounting in the sector that still has ramifications today.

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During the 1980s and 1990s, two giants of the soft drinks world went to war. In the red corner we had the Coca-Cola Company. In the blue corner was PepsiCo. While Coca-Cola would entice us with the ‘New Coke’ before seducing us back again with ‘Classic Coke’; Pepsi used a whole host of pop and movie stars to show us they were the ‘Taste for a New Generation’ and even went as far as demonstrating to us that the average person on the street preferred Pepsi thanks to their ‘Pepsi Challenge’.

Just when we thought the marketing landscape was getting a little dull, we now have a new battle on the horizon. Instead of battling to quench your thirst… this time we have a battle to satisfy your online search needs. Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls… let’s get ready to rumble as Facebook, Google and Microsoft go to war in the battle to become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the search engines.

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“Mirror, mirror on the wall, how do I look in the Aqua Circle-Print Tube Dress? Oh it’s nice…but it’s not quite right…have you got it in red…and maybe one size up? Oh yes…that’s perfect. Now let me send this to my friends…girls look at me…what do you think? OMG they love it – I’ll take it…”

Coming soon to a high-street fitting room near you…welcome to the exciting world of Interactive Mirrors.

Interactive whatnow?

An Interactive Mirror is – as its name suggests – a mirror you can interact with. Basically, simply looking at your reflection is like so last year. Now you can actually manipulate it, using the mirror’s touch-screen surface to do everything from trying out new clothes and hairstyles, to giving yourself a tan.

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On 28th May 2009, Google announced its grand vision for the future of internet communication. By harnessing the power of HTML 5 – the next major revision to the core language of the World Wide Web – Google is putting the final touches to a brand new “personal communication and collaboration tool” for a brand new era. It’s called Google Wave.

As a real-time communication platform, Google Wave combines email, instant messaging, web chat, wikis, social networking and project management (among other things) in one elegant, in-browser communication client. With a release scheduled in late 2009, it is already being hailed by some as the ‘next generation’ of email. Read more…